On Tue, 20 Apr 2004, Martin Svensson wrote:
[color=blue]
> The problem I am experiencing is that the machine
> starts to swap (performance is still good though). We
> have a cache of 90GB, 3GB of memory and cache_mem is
> set to 128MB. We are caching quite large files to
> speed up frequent downloads (up to 100MB files).
>
> Acccording to the FAQ, this setup should use:
> 90GB cache = 900MB
> cache_mem = +128MB
> Add. mem = +20MB
> Total recommended: 1048MB x 2 = 2096MB.
>
> I still have 1GB left of memory. No other memory
> intense applications are running on this server and
> still it swaps out as much as 600-700MB before I
> manually restart the cache. It's running on RHEL 3.0.
>
> Any hints are appreciated. If more info is needed,
> just let me know. I just don't see the reason to why
> it swaps out so much.
>
> ---
> Memory usage for squid via mallinfo():
> Total space in arena: 717313 KB[/color]

Not your Squid causing the system to swap...

If this worries you try disabling the swap partition, but if you are not
seeing any performance degration it is probably nothing to worry about and
just your OS saving copies on the swap partition just in case it would
need to swap things out.. but having the data duplicated in swap the OS
can quickly reclaim memory should it be needed so some OS:es slowly write
out memory pages to the swap partition while "idle".